Category Archives: Individualism Vs. Collectivism

If you plant a Bernie Sanders sign in your yard—a man who has promises variations on price controls and nationalization of industries—you should suffer the worst of fates. The problem: Everybody will be affected by your emotions-driven economic and ethical ignorance—ignorance of the natural laws of economics and oblivion to the rights of free individuals to freely exchange titles to private property. In Bernie style, shortages will be blamed on “evil producers.” Further incursions will follow as “evil producers” are roped into bondage by the state. As such interventions beget more of the same, we will end up with the “Venezuela Playbook: The Communist Manifesto.”

… This choice between “fair” prices and arrest is now the norm for business owners in Venezuela. The most outrageous instance of this took place in early November, when government security forces occupied local electronics stores and began handing out TVs and other wares at “fair” (read: rock-bottom) prices. Hebert Garcia, head of the High Commission for the People’s Defense of the Economy, put it bluntly: “We have to guarantee that everybody has a plasma television and the latest-generation fridge.”
Not surprisingly, the masses lined up around the block for their piece of the government’s action. Too bad the government has failed to provide enough electricity to power the plunder. In most countries, this would be called government theft. But, under Maduro’s reign of Marxism, this redistribution has become business as usual. …

Michael Walls: The fact that communism appeals so heavily to “intellectuals” is disturbing. Socialism is just “communism lite”, and the communism that socialism derived from is so absurd in it’s details it’s hard not to laugh out loud reading it. Maybe we need to re-examine the term “intellectual”.

Ilana Mercer No, Michael Walls, the fact that some communists are deemed or called “heavily intellectual” is what’s disturbing—disturbing for what it says on how we judge intellect. Your conclusion is 100%.

The Left’s creed carries over into its “management” of wildlife: Live in a herd or we’ll kill you.

The details are sketchy because written by left-liberal, state-adulating outlets, like The Washington Post. The same short-on-details storyline is echoed by ALL other news outlets and by the droning clones on social media.

Translated: The official say-so is the only say-so.

A baby bison is found at Yellowstone National Park by two good samaritans. The official account fails to provide inconvenient details because it has a distinct angle. However, logic tells me tourists would not remove a baby bison from its mom and herd. This likely was a solitary newborn. And, indeed, buried at the end of the malicious depiction of the do-goobers is this:

… the tourists found the bison in the middle of a road and tried, unsuccessfully, to make it move.
“Out of desperation,” said a Yellowstone spokeswoman, they took it to rangers. “They were just concerned about the well-being of the animal.”

(Media deserve to die-out if they hire reporters who can’t write sans a personal angle. As an editor, I’m running a red marker through phrases such as “decided it looked cold,” to be replaced with neutral descriptions: “The tourists report/claim the baby was … in the middle of the road, unable to … “)

These “stupid tourists,” whom none of the still stupider journalists and followers of officialdom seemed to have interviewed, are alleged to have absconded with the baby bison because he looked cold.

Naturally, the fanatic rangers who’ll not tolerate deviation from nature euthanized the baby.

It ought to be up to private property proprietors to decide what kind of bathrooms they wish to offer at their establishments.

Myself, I’d avoid establishments that don’t offer strict, separate, “ladies” and “gents” loos. I don’t think it’s safe. Women-only bathrooms have worked quite well for women. You never have to think, “It’s late at night, I hope there’s no scary or creepy looking man in there and I am not allowed to carry.”

… On the University of Missouri campus, atavistic youth have joined against hurtful words, symbols and unsettling, unorthodox ideas, and for “safe spaces,” where these brave hearts can hideout from “racial microaggression.” Examples of “microaggression” are asking a black student for lessons in twerking, complimenting her weave, or simply being white.

But mostly, these minorities and their propagandized white patsies are campaigning for the unanimous acceptance of the following destructive, dangerous, often deadly, dictum:

The “systemic racism” meme you hear repeated by media, across the American campus, and preached from the White House is a function of “Critical Race Theory,” the sub-intelligent, purely theoretical, and logically fallacious construct, now creeping into American schools at every level.

As detailed in WND colleague Colin Flaherty’s “Don’t Make the Black Kids Angry,” America’s children, black, white and brown, are being taught, starting at a tender age, about “racial hostility and resentment.”

This racial hostility is said to be endemic and always and everywhere a white on black affair.

Ask your state representative and your school board about Glenn Singleton and his Pacific Educational Group’s curriculum, deceptively titled “Courageous Conversations.” The PEG poisonous program has been adopted by “hundreds of school districts across the US,” and foisted on millions of pupils, very possibly your child.

Beware; propaganda is process oriented, and an insidious one at that.

ITEM: Your cherub’s project receives an A. His work the teacher praises before the classroom. Yet, oddly, the child’s identity she will studiously conceal. This is in furtherance of the egalitarian idea, implemented, whereby no individual student is to be identified as having produced superior work to that of the collective.

“[U]nder the Singleton influence,” explains Flaherty, “the Seattle schools [have] defined individualism as a form of cultural racism and said that only whites can be racist.” Moreover, “emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology is a form of racism,” too.

The progressive educational project carries its anti-white bias into teaching about the Orient (East) versus the Occident (West).

ITEM: A Christian boy, placed in an academically advanced study program, is tasked with submitting a project about one of three ancient civilizations: Egypt, India and Rome.

Did anyone beside the author say, “Choose India. Rome is … BORING?” It appears she made it up so she could get really worked up about it, like the Ask-a-Mexican guy.

ilana mercer says:
@David

Both ITEMS in the essay are true. “Kid” in question is like family to this writer. Enough said. The article was prompted, in part, by this “close encounter.” Saying Rome is boring is so weird; too peculiar to make up. Even more peculiar is suggesting someone unknown to you is a liar. Nice.

UPDATE III (11/21): The manner of subversion is so subtle, a busy parent can’t hope to stay on top the propaganda underway in schools. If you are able to detect the programming, deprogram daily using Socratic questioning. So talk to the brats (unpleasant notion, I know). When my daughter used to return from school, and declare something preposterous, I would begin the deprogramming through questioning. Having a child in the public school system comes with the added responsibility to know your child is being programmed—not to doubt it or defend against it—and to be prepared to deprogram or access resources to so do. (Examples of resources are the Homeschool Courses of historian Tom Woods and Ron Paul, or this writer’s columns on economics and the Constitution (and all others focusing on proper reasoning), to be found in the Articles Archive (http://www.ilanamercer.com/phprunner/public_article_list_search.php?Search+by+Category=Search+by+Category). A list of books is a good idea (a short one is here: http://barelyablog.com/classical-liberalism/. Literature is here: http://www.ilanamercer.com/phprunner/public_article_list_view.php?editid1=796). Send your suggestions. Kids can begin with Ayn Rand. We all do. Please post resources parents can access, under this thread.

Inculcating proper reasoning in a child is vital in the deprogramming effort. My columns are anchored in argument and reason (as best I can). For example, and in context of David’s comment, my “Reincarnation of the Reds” brings up the concept of “the theory that can’t be falsified.” (This is not to say one can’t be, as I am, a private property conservationist.)